David Cameron's admission that he plans to snoop on his children's Facebook
accounts is totally not cool. Holly Baxter explains why his daughter
Nancy deserves to make her own digital mistakes and finally get some privacy
like normal girls.

Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife Samantha sit at a cafe in Majorca, Spain, while on holiday on the island in the summer of 2012. This year his clothes have faired better with the critics.Photo: Peter Byrne/PA

Ah, David Cameron: Prime Minister, prime interviewee at Grazia magazine, prime example of an oily T-zone. His interview this week in the celebrity mag, which usually enjoys asking if Katy Perry is incubating a baby or a burrito, centred around women and the media, particularly in relation to his eldest daughter Nancy. Discussions have already begun in the Cameron household, apparently, about the pressures exerted upon women and how image isn’t everything.

And while all of this is applaudable, there’s a sneaky little tidbit hidden in there:DC wants access to his children’s Facebook pages when they’re older, arguing that a little bit of internet snoopery is a parent’s right in order to protect kiddies from ruining their job prospects when they’re older. “When we were young, we went on holiday and took pictures and put them in the cupboard,” he mused. “Now everyone shows their pictures on Facebook, they need to think: well, what about that job interview?”

Now, if anyone’s to know about bad holiday photos having an effect on their career, it’s our Dave. The poor man has been berated for wearing the same three polo shirts each year by every media outlet possible, generating headlines such as ‘David Cameron kicks off hols with another fashion mishap’ (The Sun), ‘David Cameron’s fashion faux pas in Spain’ (The Huffington Post), ‘David Cameron appears awkward in holiday garb’ (The Daily Mail), and ‘What David Cameron should have worn on holiday’ (The Guardian).

Perhaps more promisingly, The Telegraph’s fashion team came up with ‘David Cameron overcomes terrible taste in holiday clothing’ this week, but there’s no guaranteeing that this brief hiatus from polos and socks with sandals will continue. If his own parents were peering over his shoulder and reading these headlines, no doubt they would be muttering away about bringing all Old Etonians into disrepute before confiscating his wardrobe. But here’s the point: Dave had to make his own mistakes. Only through a healthy amount of ridicule did he finally learn.

Which is why I fundamentally disagree with his assertion that monitoring children’s internet usage will do them any good. Kids post some disgusting stuff on social networking sites, for sure. They are hyper-aware of building up their own image and will do so through carefully crafted selfies and statuses containing ‘meaningful’ lyrics from Taylor Swift’s new album; they will attack one another over whatever’s replacing MSN Messenger, and they will try out the ‘connect with random, possibly masturbating strangers’ trope through mediums such as Chatroulette. None of these are particularly attractive parts of adolescence, but they are now gross little rites of passage which are entirely unavoidable. If Dave sits behind Nancy while she checks her Tumblr page, she’ll just go over to her friend’s house to find out about everything her dad doesn’t want her to see. And trust me, it’ll all seem a hell of a lot more compelling that way.

I understand the parental need to feel like they have control over the main part of their children’s lives. I understand it mainly because of my mother, who professes not to be able to use the internet but still manages to be looking at the browsing history on my laptop whenever she comes to visit and is left alone in a room for more than five minutes (despite the fact that the worst thing she’d probably find is my slightly age-inappropriate affection for Harry Styles and the fact that I’ve been considering an autumn jumpsuit. My flatmate maintains that these are actually the worst things a parent could ever uncover.)

But kids as young as nine-year-old Nancy now conduct their entire lives online. Where once there were pranks and graffiti, there is now trolling and protracted arguments on Twitter. It’s all the same sentiment: children pushing their luck in the world they’ve grown up in, and learning through trial and error what’s acceptable.

Protected from making these errors, it’s difficult to grow up nowadays. Most people’s lives are conducted online, so there’s no use pretending that anyone as young as Nancy Cameron could possibly opt out. And how will she know to protect her Facebook privacy settings like the gates of Hades if she hasn’t been through the trauma of knowing that she once dyed her hair black with pink stripes, took a photo, typed Placebo lyrics over the top of it, and posted it on MySpace (something I, ahem, never did myself)? How will she know that she has the power to report online abuse if her father always steps in on her behalf, scrolling through her picture comments and checking for mean girls calling her ugly? How will she feel confident in what to reveal and how to present herself in the cybersphere if there’s always been someone breathing down her neck, telling her what is and isn’t going into her ‘About Me’ description?

In a world where rules govern every corner and nobody plays in the street anymore, child and teen freedom mainly exists online. It’s important that they have this playground free to themselves, even if they sometimes scrape their knees in it. Of course, it’s also important to make sure that serious online abuse is dealt with - sexual pressure on young girls to send quasi-pornographic photos of themselves that inevitably end up round the entire school, for example, or gangs of homophobic and/or racist trolls waiting to leap on innocent victims, or rape threats like those received this week byfeminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez.

But ultimately, this sort of abuse is symptomatic of a problem with society. Only a culture change can stop such instances: a shift that stops trivialising sexual assault and sexism, stops condoning homophobia, stops ignoring racism, stops categorising young girls as either ‘sluts’ or ‘frigid’.

Sorry to tell you, DC, but the online world is the world, and you’d do no better monitoring Nancy’s Facebook activity throughout puberty than holding her hand every time she walked down the street. The only way to really make that world a better place for her is to continue those conversations about valuing women as equals and challenging their portrayal in the media.

And you know what? Maybe, just maybe, you should be involving her brother in those discussions, too.

Holly Baxter is co-founder and editor of The Vagenda, a blog and soon-to-be book which deals with the portayal of women and mainly makes fun of Cosmpolitan's ridiculous sex tips. She is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to the New Statesman. She also once lived in an airing cupboard.